Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. Apply modern RL methods, with deep Q-networks, value iteration, policy gradients, TRPO, AlphaGo Zero and more

Maxim Lapan

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On is a comprehensive guide to the very latest DL tools and their limitations. You will evaluate methods including Cross-entropy and policy gradients, before applying them to real-world environments. Take on both the Atari set of virtual games and family favorites such as Connect4.The book provides an introduction to the basics of RL, giving you the know-how to code intelligent learning agents to take on a formidable array of practical tasks. Discover how to implement Q-learning on 'grid world' environments, teach your agent to buy and trade stocks, and find out how natural language models are driving the boom in chatbots.

Firebase Cookbook. Over 70 recipes to help you create real-time web and mobile applications with Firebase

Houssem Yahiaoui

Do you feel tired just thinking or even hearing about backend technologies, authentication or the tedious task of deployment? Firebase is here to change the way you develop and make your app a first-class citizen of the cloud.This books takes a solution based approach by providing you recipes that would help you understand the features of Firebase and implement them in your existing web or mobile applications.We start-off by creating our first Firebase application and integrating its services into different platforms and environments for mobile as well as web applications. Then we deep dive into Real-time Database and Firebase Storage that allows your users to access data across various devices with realtive ease. With each chapter you will gradually create the building blocks of your application from securing your data with Firebase Rules to authenticating your users with O-Auth.Moving along we would explore modern application development techniques such as creating serverless applications with Firebase Cloud Functions or turning your traditional applications into progressive apps with Service workers.Finally you will learn how to create cross-platform mobile apps, integrate Firebase in native platforms, and learn how to monetize your mobile applications using Admob for Android and iOS.

Learning Functional Data Structures and Algorithms. Click here to enter text

Atul S. Khot, Raju Kumar Mishra

Functional data structures have the power to improve the codebase of an application and improve efficiency. With the advent of functional programming and with powerful functional languages such as Scala, Clojure and Elixir becoming part of important enterprise applications, functional data structures have gained an important place in the developer toolkit. Immutability is a cornerstone of functional programming. Immutable and persistent data structures are thread safe by definition and hence very appealing for writing robust concurrent programs. How do we express traditional algorithms in functional setting? Won’t we end up copying too much? Do we trade performance for versioned data structures? This book attempts to answer these questions by looking at functional implementations of traditional algorithms. It begins with a refresher and consolidation of what functional programming is all about. Next, you’ll get to know about Lists, the work horse data type for most functional languages. We show what structural sharing means and how it helps to make immutable data structures efficient and practical. Scala is the primary implementation languages for most of the examples. At times, we also present Clojure snippets to illustrate the underlying fundamental theme. While writing code, we use ADTs (abstract data types). Stacks, Queues, Trees and Graphs are all familiar ADTs. You will see how these ADTs are implemented in a functional setting. We look at implementation techniques like amortization and lazy evaluation to ensure efficiency.By the end of the book, you will be able to write efficient functional data structures and algorithms for your applications.

Deploying Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. Manage complex and heterogeneous workloads with ConfigMgr 1706

Jacek Doktór, Paweł Jarosz

It becomes important to plan, design, and deploy configurations when administrators know that Configuration Manager interacts with a number of infrastructure components such as Active Directory Domain Services, network protocols, Windows Server services, and so on.Via real-world-world deployment scenarios, this book will help you implement a single primary site or multiples sites. You will be able to efficiently plan and deploy a multiple-site hierarchy such as central administration site. Next, you will learn various methods to plan and deploy Configuration Manager clients, secure them and make the most of new features offered through ConfigMgr 1706 like compliance, deploying updates operating systems to the endpoints. Then, this book will show you how to install, configure, and run SQL reports to extract information. Lastly, you will also learn how to create and manage users access in an ConfigMgr environmentBy the end of this book, you will have learned to use the built-in mechanism to back up and restore data and also design maintenance plan.

Raspberry Pi 3 Home Automation Projects. Bringing your home to life using Raspberry Pi 3, Arduino, and ESP8266

Shantanu Bhadoria, Ruben Oliva Ramos

Raspberry Pi 3 Home Automation Projects addresses the challenge of applying real-world projects to automate your house using Raspberry Pi 3 and Arduino. You will learn how to customize and program the Raspberry Pi 3 and Arduino-based boards in several home automation projects around your house.This book aims to help you integrate different microcontrollers like Arduino, ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, Particle Photon and Raspberry Pi 3 into the real world, taking the best of these boards to develop some exciting home automation projects. We will start with an interesting project creating a Raspberry Pi Powered smart mirror and move on to Automated Gardening System, which will help you build a simple smart gardening to keep your garden healthy with minimal effort. You will also learn to build projects such as CheerLights into a holiday display, a project to erase parking headaches with OpenCV and Raspberry Pi 3, create Netfl ix's The Switch for the living room and lock down your house like Fort Knox with a Windows IoT face recognition-based door lock system.By the end of the book, you will be able to build and automate the living space with intriguing IoT projects and bring a new degree of inter connectivity to your world.

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux. Explore the methods and tools of ethical hacking with Kali Linux - Third Edition

Gilberto Najera-Gutierrez, Juned Ahmed Ansari

Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux - Third Edition shows you how to set up a lab, helps you understand the nature and mechanics of attacking websites, and explains classical attacks in great depth. This edition is heavily updated for the latest Kali Linux changes and the most recent attacks. Kali Linux shines when it comes to client-side attacks and fuzzing in particular.From the start of the book, you'll be given a thorough grounding in the concepts of hacking and penetration testing, and you'll see the tools used in Kali Linux that relate to web application hacking. You'll gain a deep understanding of classicalSQL, command-injection flaws, and the many ways to exploit these flaws. Web penetration testing also needs a general overview of client-side attacks, which is rounded out by a long discussion of scripting and input validation flaws.There is also an important chapter on cryptographic implementation flaws, where we discuss the most recent problems with cryptographic layers in the networking stack.The importance of these attacks cannot be overstated, and defending against them is relevant to most internet users and, of course, penetration testers.At the end of the book, you'll use an automated technique called fuzzing to identify flaws in a web application. Finally, you'll gain an understanding of web application vulnerabilities and the ways they can be exploited using the tools in Kali Linux.

Enterprise Application Architecture with .NET Core. An architectural journey into the Microsoft .NET open source platform

Ganesan Senthilvel, Ovais Mehboob Ahmed Khan, Habib Qureshi

If you want to design and develop enterprise applications using .NET Core as the development framework and learn about industry-wide best practices and guidelines, then this book is for you. The book starts with a brief introduction to enterprise architecture, which will help you to understand what enterprise architecture is and what the key components are. It will then teach you about the types of patterns and the principles of software development, and explain the various aspects of distributed computing to keep your applications effective and scalable. These chapters act as a catalyst to start the practical implementation, and design and develop applications using different architectural approaches, such as layered architecture, service oriented architecture, microservices and cloud-specific solutions. Gradually, you will learn about the different approaches and models of the Security framework and explore various authentication models and authorization techniques, such as social media-based authentication and safe storage using app secrets. By the end of the book, you will get to know the concepts and usage of the emerging fields, such as DevOps, BigData, architectural practices, and Artificial Intelligence.

Guide to NoSQL with Azure Cosmos DB. Work with the massively scalable Azure database service with JSON, C#, LINQ, and .NET Core 2

Gaston C. Hillar, Daron Yöndem

Cosmos DB is a NoSQL database service included in Azure that is continuously adding new features and has quickly become one of the most innovative services found in Azure, targeting mission-critical applications at a global scale. This book starts off by showing you the main features of Cosmos DB, their supported NoSQL data models and the foundations of its scalable and distributed architecture. You will learn to work with the latest available tools that simplify your tasks with Cosmos DB and reduce development costs, such as the Data Explorer in the Azure portal, Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer, and the Cosmos DB Emulator.Next, move on to working with databases and document collections. We will use the tools to run schema agnostic queries against collections with the Cosmos DB SQL dialect and understand their results. Then, we will create a first version of an application that uses the latest .NET Core SDK to interact with Cosmos DB. Next, we will create a second version of the application that will take advantage of important features that the combination of C# and the .NET Core SDK provides, such as POCOs and LINQ queries. By the end of the book, you will be able to build an application that works with a Cosmos DB NoSQL document database with C#, the .NET Core SDK, LINQ, and JSON.

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python. Write complex and powerful code using the latest features of Python 3.7 - Second Edition

Dr. Basant Agarwal, Benjamin Baka

Data structures allow you to store and organize data efficiently. They are critical to any problem, provide a complete solution, and act like reusable code. Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python teaches you the essential Python data structures and the most common algorithms for building easy and maintainable applications.This book helps you to understand the power of linked lists, double linked lists, and circular linked lists. You will learn to create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. As you make your way through the chapters, you will explore the application of binary searches and binary search trees, along with learning common techniques and structures used in tasks such as preprocessing, modeling, and transforming data. In the concluding chapters, you will get to grips with organizing your code in a manageable, consistent, and extendable way. You will also study how to bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, and merge sort algorithms in detail.By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications. You will get insights into Python implementation of all the important and relevant algorithms.

Data Wrangling with Python. Creating actionable data from raw sources

Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury

For data to be useful and meaningful, it must be curated and refined. Data Wrangling with Python teaches you the core ideas behind these processes and equips you with knowledge of the most popular tools and techniques in the domain.The book starts with the absolute basics of Python, focusing mainly on data structures. It then delves into the fundamental tools of data wrangling like NumPy and Pandas libraries. You'll explore useful insights into why you should stay away from traditional ways of data cleaning, as done in other languages, and take advantage of the specialized pre-built routines in Python. This combination of Python tips and tricks will also demonstrate how to use the same Python backend and extract/transform data from an array of sources including the Internet, large database vaults, and Excel financial tables. To help you prepare for more challenging scenarios, you'll cover how to handle missing or wrong data, and reformat it based on the requirements from the downstream analytics tool. The book will further help you grasp concepts through real-world examples and datasets.By the end of this book, you will be confident in using a diverse array of sources to extract, clean, transform, and format your data efficiently.

Hands-On Bitcoin Programming with Python. Build powerful online payment centric applications with Python

Harish Garg

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that’s changing the face of online payments. Hands-On Bitcoin Programming with Python teaches you to build software applications for mining and creating Bitcoins using Python.This book starts with the basics of both Bitcoin and blockchain and gives you an overview of these inherent concepts by showing you how to build Bitcoin-driven applications with Python. Packed with clear instructions and practical examples, you will learn to understand simple Python coding examples that work with this cryptocurrency.By the end of the book, you’ll be able to mine Bitcoins, accept Bitcoin payments on the app, and work with the basics of blockchain technology to create simply distributed ledgers.

Mastering Functional Programming. Functional techniques for sequential and parallel programming with Scala

Anatolii Kmetiuk

Functional programming is a paradigm specifically designed to deal with the complexity of software development in large projects. It helps developers to keep track of the interdependencies in the code base and changes in its state in runtime. Mastering Functional Programming provides detailed coverage of how to apply the right abstractions to reduce code complexity, so that it is easy to read and understand.Complete with explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, the book begins by covering the basics such as what lambdas are and how to write declarative code with the help of functions. It then moves on to concepts such as pure functions and type classes, the problems they aim to solve, and how to use them in real-world scenarios. You’ll also explore some of the more advanced patterns in the world of functional programming such as monad transformers and Tagless Final. In the concluding chapters, you’ll be introduced to the actor model, which you can implement in modern functional languages, and delve into parallel programming.By the end of the book, you will be able to apply the concepts of functional programming and object-oriented programming (OOP)in order to build robust applications.

Ethereum Cookbook. Over 100 recipes covering Ethereum-based tokens, games, wallets, smart contracts, protocols, and Dapps

Manoj P R

Ethereum and Blockchain will change the way software is built for business transactions. Most industries have been looking to leverage these new technologies to gain efficiencies and create new business models and opportunities.The Ethereum Cookbook covers various solutions such as setting up Ethereum, writing smart contracts, and creating tokens, among others. You’ll learn about the security vulnerabilities, along with other protocols of Ethereum.Once you have understood the basics, you’ll move on to exploring various design decisions and tips to make your application scalable and secure. In addition to this, you’ll work with various Ethereum packages such as Truffle, Web3, and Ganache.By the end of this book, you’ll have comprehensively grasped the Ethereum principles and ecosystem.

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook. Over 100 hands-on recipes to sharpen your skills in high-performance numerical computing and data science in the Jupyter Notebook - Second Edition

Cyrille Rossant

Python is one of the leading open source platforms for data science and numerical computing. IPython and the associated Jupyter Notebook offer efficient interfaces to Python for data analysis and interactive visualization, and they constitute an ideal gateway to the platform.IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook, Second Edition contains many ready-to-use, focused recipes for high-performance scientific computing and data analysis, from the latest IPython/Jupyter features to the most advanced tricks, to help you write better and faster code. You will apply these state-of-the-art methods to various real-world examples, illustrating topics in applied mathematics, scientific modeling, and machine learning.The first part of the book covers programming techniques: code quality and reproducibility, code optimization, high-performance computing through just-in-time compilation, parallel computing, and graphics card programming. The second part tackles data science, statistics, machine learning, signal and image processing, dynamical systems, and pure and applied mathematics.

Drupal 8 Module Development. Build modules and themes using the latest version of Drupal 8 - Second Edition

Daniel Sipos

Drupal 8 comes with a release cycle that allows for new functionality to be added at a much faster pace. However, this also means code deprecations and changing architecture that you need to stay on top of. This book updates the first edition and includes the new functionality introduced in versions up to, and including 8.7.The book will first introduce you to the Drupal 8 architecture and its subsystems before diving into creating your first module with basic functionality. You will work with the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer and work with menus and links programmatically. Then, you will learn how to work with different kinds of data storages, create custom entities, field types and leverage the Database API for lower level database queries. You will further see how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with the various file systems and ensure the code you write works on multilingual sites. Finally, you will learn how to programmatically work with Views, write automated tests for your functionality and also write secure code in general.By the end, you will have learned how to develop your own custom module that can provide complex business solutions. And who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute it back to the Drupal community.Foreword by Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal.

Regression Analysis with R. Design and develop statistical nodes to identify unique relationships within data at scale

Giuseppe Ciaburro

Regression analysis is a statistical process which enables prediction of relationships between variables. The predictions are based on the casual effect of one variable upon another. Regression techniques for modeling and analyzing are employed on large set of data in order to reveal hidden relationship among the variables.This book will give you a rundown explaining what regression analysis is, explaining you the process from scratch. The first few chapters give an understanding of what the different types of learning are – supervised and unsupervised, how these learnings differ from each other. We then move to covering the supervised learning in details covering the various aspects of regression analysis. The outline of chapters are arranged in a way that gives a feel of all the steps covered in a data science process – loading the training dataset, handling missing values, EDA on the dataset, transformations and feature engineering, model building, assessing the model fitting and performance, and finally making predictions on unseen datasets. Each chapter starts with explaining the theoretical concepts and once the reader gets comfortable with the theory, we move to the practical examples to support the understanding. The practical examples are illustrated using R code including the different packages in R such as R Stats, Caret and so on. Each chapter is a mix of theory and practical examples.By the end of this book you will know all the concepts and pain-points related to regression analysis, and you will be able to implement your learning in your projects.

Mastering Unity 5.x. Click here to enter text

Alan Thorn

Mastering Unity 5.x is for developers wishing to optimize the features of Unity 5.x. With an in-depth focus on a practical project, learn all about Unity architecture and impressive animation techniques. With this book, produce fun games with confidence.

Learning AWK Programming. A fast, and simple cutting-edge utility for text-processing on the Unix-like environment

Shiwang Kalkhanda

AWK is one of the most primitive and powerful utilities which exists in all Unix and Unix-like distributions. It is used as a command-line utility when performing a basic text-processing operation, and as programming language when dealing with complex text-processing and mining tasks. With this book, you will have the required expertise to practice advanced AWK programming in real-life examples. The book starts off with an introduction to AWK essentials. You will then be introduced to regular expressions, AWK variables and constants, arrays and AWK functions and more. The book then delves deeper into more complex tasks, such as printing formatted output in AWK, control flow statements, GNU's implementation of AWK covering the advanced features of GNU AWK, such as network communication, debugging, and inter-process communication in the GAWK programming language which is not easily possible with AWK. By the end of this book, the reader will have worked on the practical implementation of text processing and pattern matching using AWK to perform routine tasks.

C++17 STL Cookbook. Discover the latest enhancements to functional programming and lambda expressions

Jacek Galowicz

C++ has come a long way and is in use in every area of the industry. Fast, efficient, and flexible, it is used to solve many problems. The upcoming version of C++ will see programmers change the way they code. If you want to grasp the practical usefulness of the C++17 STL in order to write smarter, fully portable code, then this book is for you.Beginning with new language features, this book will help you understand the language’s mechanics and library features, and offers insight into how they work. Unlike other books, ours takes an implementation-specific, problem-solution approach that will help you quickly overcome hurdles. You will learn the core STL concepts, such as containers, algorithms, utility classes, lambda expressions, iterators, and more, while working on practical real-world recipes. These recipes will help you get the most from the STL and show you how to program in a better way. By the end of the book, you will be up to date with the latest C++17 features and save time and effort while solving tasks elegantly using the STL.

Intelligent Projects Using Python. 9 real-world AI projects leveraging machine learning and deep learning with TensorFlow and Keras

Santanu Pattanayak

This book will be a perfect companion if you want to build insightful projects from leading AI domains using Python.The book covers detailed implementation of projects from all the core disciplines of AI. We start by covering the basics of how to create smart systems using machine learning and deep learning techniques. You will assimilate various neural network architectures such as CNN, RNN, LSTM, to solve critical new world challenges. You will learn to train a model to detect diabetic retinopathy conditions in the human eye and create an intelligent system for performing a video-to-text translation. You will use the transfer learning technique in the healthcare domain and implement style transfer using GANs. Later you will learn to build AI-based recommendation systems, a mobile app for sentiment analysis and a powerful chatbot for carrying customer services. You will implement AI techniques in the cybersecurity domain to generate Captchas. Later you will train and build autonomous vehicles to self-drive using reinforcement learning. You will be using libraries from the Python ecosystem such as TensorFlow, Keras and more to bring the core aspects of machine learning, deep learning, and AI.By the end of this book, you will be skilled to build your own smart models for tackling any kind of AI problems without any hassle.

Mastering Android Game Development with Unity. Build high-end Android games with Unity's advanced features

Wajahat Karim, Siddharth Shekar

Game engines such as Unity are the power-tools behind the games we know and love. Unity is one of the most widely-used and best loved packages for game development and is used by everyone, from hobbyists to large studios, to create games and interactive experiences for the Web, desktop, mobile, and console. With Unity's intuitive, easy-to-learn toolset and this book, it's never been easier to become a game developer.You will begin with the basic concepts of Android game development, a brief history of Android games, the building blocks of Android games in Unity 5, and the basic flow of games. You will configure an empty project for the Jetpack Joyride Clone Game, add an environment and characters, and control them. Next you will walk through topics such as particle systems, camera management, prefabs, animations, triggers, colliders, and basic GUI systems. You will then cover the basic setup for 3D action fighting games, importing models, textures and controlling them with a virtual on-screen joystick. Later you will set up Scene for 3D Configuration, create basic gameplays, and manage input controls. Next you will learn to create the interface for the main menu, gameplay, game over, achievements, and high score screens. Finally you will polish your game with stats, sounds, and Social Networking, followed by testing the game on Android devices and then publishing it on Google Play, Amazon, and OUYA Stores.

Selenium Framework Design in Data-Driven Testing. Build data-driven test frameworks using Selenium WebDriver, AppiumDriver, Java, and TestNG

Carl Cocchiaro

The Selenium WebDriver 3.x Technology is an open source API available to test both Browser and Mobile applications. It is completely platform independent in that tests built for one browser or mobile device, will also work on all other browsers and mobile devices. Selenium supports all major development languages which allow it to be tied directly into the technology used to develop the applications. This guide will provide a step-by-step approach to designing and building a data-driven test framework using Selenium WebDriver, Java, and TestNG.The book starts off by introducing users to the Selenium Page Object Design Patterns and D.R.Y Approaches to Software Development. In doing so, it covers designing and building a Selenium WebDriver framework that supports both Browser and Mobile Devices. It will lead the user through a journey of architecting their own framework with a scalable driver class, Java utility classes, JSON Data Provider, Data-Driven Test Classes, and support for third party tools and plugins.Users will learn how to design and build a Selenium Grid from scratch to allow the framework to scale and support different browsers, mobile devices, versions, and platforms, and how they can leverage third party grids in the Cloud like SauceLabs.Other topics covered include designing abstract base and sub-classes, inheritance, dual-driver support, parallel testing, testing multi-branded applications, best practices for using locators, and data encapsulation.Finally, you will be presented with a sample fully-functional framework to get them up and running with the Selenium WebDriver for browser testing.By the end of the book, you will be able to design your own automation testing framework and perform data-driven testing with Selenium WebDriver.

Mastering Predictive Analytics with scikit-learn and TensorFlow. Implement machine learning techniques to build advanced predictive models using Python

Alvaro Fuentes

Python is a programming language that provides a wide range of features that can be used in the field of data science. Mastering Predictive Analytics with scikit-learn and TensorFlow covers various implementations of ensemble methods, how they are used with real-world datasets, and how they improve prediction accuracy in classification and regression problems.This book starts with ensemble methods and their features. You will see that scikit-learn provides tools for choosing hyperparameters for models. As you make your way through the book, you will cover the nitty-gritty of predictive analytics and explore its features and characteristics. You will also be introduced to artificial neural networks and TensorFlow, and how it is used to create neural networks. In the final chapter, you will explore factors such as computational power, along with improvement methods and software enhancements for efficient predictive analytics.By the end of this book, you will be well-versed in using deep neural networks to solve common problems in big data analysis.

Learn Type-Driven Development. Benefit from type systems to build reliable and safe applications using ReasonML 3

Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva

Type-driven development is an approach that uses a static type system to achieve results including safety and efficiency. Types are used to express relationships and other assumptions directly in the code, and these assumptions are enforced by the compiler before the code is run. Learn Type-Driven Development covers how to use these type systems to check the logical consistency of your code. This book begins with the basic idea behind type-driven development. You’ll learn about values (or terms) and how they contrast with types. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll cover how to combine types and values inside modules and build structured types out of simpler ones. You’ll then understand how to express choices or alternatives directly in the type system using variants, polymorphic variants, and generalized algebraic data types. You’ll also get to grips with sum types, build sophisticated data types from generics, and explore functions that express change in the types of values. In the concluding chapters, you’ll cover advanced techniques for code reuse, such as parametric polymorphism and subtyping.By end of this book, you will have learned how to iterate through a type-driven process of solving coding problems using static types, together with dynamic behavior, to obtain more safety and speed.